


The Complicated Family History of Mephis SaDiablo

by LorienofLoth



Category: Black Jewels - Anne Bishop
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 05:48:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10551114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LorienofLoth/pseuds/LorienofLoth
Summary: Or, ten reasons to fade into the darkness.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just a bit of a look at Mephis really. Done on my mobile, so my apologies for any mistakes.

Peyton is a disappointment. Mephis is grown up, old enough to go on long walks around the Hall with his father and have him explain about protocol, old enough to wear the Sapphire Jewel which is his birthright. Mephis can do Craft. Peyton can’t do anything. He’s a baby and he’s boring. Mephis spends more time with Lady Broghann, his governess, and with his mama, who agrees with him that Peyton is boring. It’s their secret though, and he isn’t to tell daddy, because daddy loves Peyton lots and lots, and doesn’t like it when you say he is boring, even though he is. 

Mama still leaves him in the garden with Peyton though, even though she knows he’s boring. Mephis wants to play Jhinka raiders, but Peyton just crawls about and giggles and it isn’t fair. Mephis wants to be Uncle Andulvar at the Siege of Ebon Rih, but it’s not fun fighting by himself. He still tries though, swinging a branch about and pretending it’s a set of fighting sticks like Uncle Andulvar’s. He’s having fun when he realises the garden is eerily quiet. Peyton isn’t curled up in the shade of the beech tree where Mephis had left him. Panic rushes through him like a flood, making his fingers shake, and he can feel a scream in his throat, ready to burst out, when he hears a cry. He runs after it to find Peyton sat in the duck pond, crying steadily. Mephis picks him up, even though he’s all wet, and hugs him close. 

‘I’ll never leave you alone again brother,’ he promises. ‘And this can be our secret.’

 

Mephis doesn’t have an artistic bone in his body. Lady Broghann had said it, laughing, and so had his father. He doesn’t care. He isn’t secretly dreaming of being a painter or a flautist or a poet. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t appreciate fine artwork, that he doesn’t feel a sense of wonder watching Ravenar paint. His current work is a battlefield scene, Eyrien, harsh and glorious, all silky dark wings and bloody blades. Mephis is content just to watch him paint, but Ravenar’s wings are twitching like they always do when he’s nervous. 

‘Mephis, do you think I should leave the Hall?’

Mephis prides himself on being the steady, unflappable one, without Peyton’s temper or Ravenar’s flights of fancy, but the question shakes him to the core. It has always been the three of them, in the Hall, just a little bit too dark for most people to be comfortable with, especially since he made the Offering. 

‘Why would you leave?’

He doesn’t mean to sound like he’s begging, but the tone is there and he can’t seem to shift it around the lump in his throat.

‘I heard them talking in the village. They said it was inappropriate, with my mother and all, for me to stay here with Uncle Saetan.’

‘Our mother,’ Mephis corrects. ‘And I’m glad you have our mother; that’s what makes us brothers. Otherwise we’d only be cousins.’

Ravenar laughs at that, open and loose. ‘Only cousins? How terrible.’

But he doesn’t mention leaving again, and Mephis considers it a job well done.

 

Mephis meets Shira before Peyton does. He’s representing father on a business trip to Dharo, and the Celina, the Territory Queen, has a court full of musicians and dancers. He’s rushing away from the games tables, where he had been trapped by some vague acquaintances who had been desperate to talk to him about some investments he was just has to hear about, when he knocks straight into a witch, spilling her drink. He flushes bright red, but she just laughs and wipes her dress. She’s pretty when she laughs, and even prettier when she plays the flute, he learns half an hour later. After the performance he gets her a drink to apologise for the one he spilled and she thanks him and they end up talking for hours about music and court dances and the differences in both between Dharo and Dhemlan. 

The next time he’s in Dharo, he invites her out for lunch with himself and Peyton, and he doesn’t know if he’s ever felt as comfortable, or as at home. It’s three months after that that Peyton tells him he’s bought a wedding ring. 

 

There is a small grave in the grounds of the Hall in Kaeleer for Mephis’ brother who never was. Mephis goes there every year, not on his brother’s birthday, but in spring, the time of rebirth and growth. It seems appropriate. 

 

After he learns about Zuulaman, it is two months before Mephis goes back to the Hall. Oh, he has perfectly good reasons for being elsewhere, trade to discuss in Dharo, treaties to hammer out in Glacia. All the same, it’s two months before Mephis goes home again.

He talks to his father about the price of carpets from Dharo; about the weather in Scelt and its effect on the harvest; about Amdarh’s theatre scene. They chat over dinner, a four course feast better than anything Mephis ate while away from home, and continue the banal conversation over drinks afterwards. Mephis stares at his father and tries to reconcile the man who read him bedtime stories, who listens to his thoughts about the arts even though he probably shouldn’t, with the man who destroyed an entire people, who removed them from the history books.

He never quite manages it.

 

Ravenar is pacing outside the birthing room frantically, has been for hours. Orian’s periodic screams rip through the room; Mephis wishes there was some way to put an aural shield around the room, but if he did it now Ravenar would probably try to break in, and that’s the last thing Orian needs. 

‘You can come in now,’ the midwife says, stepping back from the doorway to allow them into the room. Orian looks exhausted, her skin pale and sallow, and there are tear-tracks down her cheeks. Ravenar has rushed to her side, but Mephis’ eyes are fixed on the baby in Andulvar’s arms, freshly washed and wrapped in a blanket. Andulvar hands the baby to him, whispers, ‘his name is Prothvar.’

 

Mephis looks for his mother on the battlefield. He isn’t sure why, isn’t sure what exactly he would do if he found her—or maybe he is sure, and that’s why he’s not exactly sure if he wants to find her—but he looks nonetheless. It is futile. She isn’t there, isn’t fighting in this war she has schemed and lied and plotted to cause. Mephis stares at one of her soldiers, his eyes big and gold and young, as he plummets to the depth of the Grey, and continues to stare as he rises back up and unleashes his power, exploding the boy’s head, and the heads of the soldiers around him. One gold eye lands at his feet. Mephis doesn’t hesitate, unleashing a burst of witchfire with the Sapphire.

By the time he steps off the battlefield, the Grey is drained, and the Sapphire isn’t much better off.  Andulvar and Prothvar are dead, Prothvar’s mouth still bloody. They tell him Ravenar is dead and he laughs, looks for him. His brother may be dead, but what does that matter? There are so many demon-dead that they’ll be fighting for standing room in Hell.

He waits for Ravenar, and for Peyton, also dead they say, to arrive from Dharo. They don’t come. His mother doesn’t come looking for them either, her two sons dead in this war of her own making.

 

He had investigated the magic on the cildru dyathe’s island, had looked into the source of that magic and power, yet when he finally met the witch responsible, Mephis was disappointed. She was slight, even for six or seven, with tight ringlets, too large for her pointed face, bound with a blue ribbon. There was nothing extraordinary about her at all, until he looked at her eyes. Sapphire eyes, ancient and haunted and knowing. 

His father was teaching her he knew, but for a mad second he considered pushing him aside, teaching her himself, absconding deep into Dhemlan. And then he laughed to himself. She was his Queen, after all, but he didn’t want a student. A niece on the other hand...

 

Jaenelle and Lucivar’s sparring matches are a beautiful sight, both of them moving too fast, both of them slightly too predatory. Mephis knows how to fight with sticks, was trained by Andulvar Yaslana himself, but that doesn’t make these fights any less mesmerising. They both flow smoothly through the movements, and if either has an advantage he is unable to see it. They keep up their fast pace for minutes, until most would have shaking muscles and stumbling steps. Lucivar has neither as he swings a stick towards Jaenelle’s feet. She shifts her weight smoothly, but it must have been a feint, because she slams into Lucivar’s other stick and then, as he moves towards her, into the dirt. It is surprisingly hard to watch. 

‘Good fight, Cat,’ he says, pulling her to her feet. ‘Or at least, it would have been if you were trying.’ She hisses and Mephis worries they’re about to continue the fight, but Lucivar looks at him instead. ‘Fancy a spar, brother?’

A fighting stick is thrown at him before he has a chance to refuse, and he starts a warm-up. Lucivar considers his form carefully, and he’s smirking but there’s a look in his eye that makes Mephis nervous. 

‘You’re out of practice, brother,’ Lucivar says, and Mephis rolls his eyes. It must be a younger brother thing; Peyton and Ravenar had said the same, giggling, on more than one occasion. Lucivar isn’t giggling, but then this youngest brother has edges they never had. Still, it is a familiar routine, and looking at the tension in his brother’s hands where they hold the bladed sticks, unlike in his far more challenging fight with Jaenelle, Mephis wonders if that isn’t true only for him. And, sighing, he scoffs and continues the fight, taking a hard hit on his upper arm. The things he does for his brothers.

 

Mephis is interrupted by a knock on his door. It is his brother, with his cold eyes and a beautiful smile with no warmth. Daemon has been blocking access to Jaenelle for days, as she’s been withdrawing from them, and he wishes he knew this distant brother better. Or at all. And maybe that’s his fault—he hadn’t pressed to be around Daemon as a baby, or Lucivar, had agreed with his father that the living were for the living, and the dead the dead, hadn’t sought either of them out after their birthright ceremonies, offered them a safe harbour, although he could, or could at least have tried—but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t regret it now. 

Daemon tells him Jaenelle needs him, takes him to her, and by the time she’s finished explaining everything to him, he realises that this may be his last chance to protect his new sharp-edged, predatory brother. 

And that’s not why he agrees—he has a whole host of reasons: Jaenelle, his father, Lucivar, the coven, the boys, Dhemlan, his dead brothers, all of them, his nephews, Prothvar and Daemonar, one so young and one long dead, and the fact that behind this all is his mother—but it puts a smile on his centuries dead face nonetheless. 

 


End file.
